Blogger Boy Up!
June 1, 2024
Hi there! Miss me??
I've spent the last week or so rebuilding this blog by hand, from scratch. I did it all at the code level. I had to relearn some HTML and to fully learn CSS. I'm sorry for the geek-speak, but for me, a geek, learning 30 year old technologies is super hip and retro-cool!
I don't think the earth quaked when I stopped adding entries to this blog. Or when I let the hosting and domain expire. Unfortunately, in the process of allowing those things to expire, I lost several entries and a bunch of pictures. Apparently I also lost Rule 14 - but, I have a new Rule 14, a lesson learned from allowing the web-hosting to expire: Trust No One! (I thought I was paranoid enough, but I was wrong!)
So, the last entry I've been able to recover was in June, 2021. My very uninteresting life has been quite the tumult since then.
My job got busy and weird. They called us back to the office - as if we werent still living in Covidland. In January of '23, I found out I needed some teeth removed and some pretty radical jaw surgery. In June, out of nowhere, I was kicked off my team at work and put “on the bench”... I would spend my days, IN THE OFFICE, masked up, sitting elbow to elbow with unmasked randos, applying for internal jobs (and external jobs, natch.) In August, I had my surgery. They had removed a total of five teeth on my right jaw up to that point. They removed two inches of bone due to an aggressive, non-cancerous lesion that was destroying my jaw. They installed a titanium cradle for some “bone in a bottle” to heal up the jaw. So, now, I'm missing some teeth and have a spot on my lower lip with no feeling and a lisp. Until 2023, I had never spent a night in the hospital. That year I had a total of four surgeries, three overnight hospital stays and two of those were emergency room visits. But, relatively little pain and I'm all healed up. After about a month of convalescence, I returned to “the bench”. After applying for literally hundreds of jobs, internally and externally, they let me go in October. I kept applying for jobs, even a couple back with the company I had worked for. No luck. My unemployment ran out at the end of April.
So, here we are, the first of June, 2024.
As I said, I have spent the last week rebuilding the blog and reformatting the sickeningly few blog entries I could rescue, a mere twenty one. But, more sickening, I probably only lost four, maybe five. My big travel blog project was twenty five blog entries and a handful of vlogs on YouTube. In doing that reformatting (and editing) I kept reading about my wish to someday quit my job and do travel writing full time...
The job market right now is crazy. We're awaiting a historic election coming in just five months, more historic than average now that the candidate for one of the parties has 34 felony counts and probably more coming. The unemployment rate is the lowest it's been since the 60s. And, yet, people are having trouble finding jobs, companies are having massive layoffs and some of those same companies have thousands and thousands of jobs listed. Some listings are just there to collect resumes, “ghost jobs” they're called. Job candidates can wait weeks, even months to hear they've been rejected for a job, or not hear anything at all, and it can take north of three months to get hired, even up to a year. I'm not the only one that sees the insanity in the market right now; other job seekers have agreed with me, even HR people and recruiters have agreed. It feels like I'm taking crazy pills.
Thus, after nearly a year of applying and my unemployment, such as it was (it barely covered my rent) having dried up... I quit.
I've quit applying to jobs. I've quit looking. I have almost quit caring. Almost. I still care, I still worry where I'll get money. I talked with a recruiter yesterday, she didn't have any openings for me. The market has changed so much my skills may have rusted off. By the time I have reskilled, I fear the market will have moved further from me. I may indeed be unemployable.
My dream of becoming a full time content creator may be my only hope for employment!
It's not easy and there's nothing set in stone. I'm going to open up my tiny retirement savings and try to make that stretch long enough to make a go as a content creator. That's why I'm putting up this blog, and I'll be putting up a second blog soon! But more on that later.
I have big plans, but that's nothing new, is it? The difference this time is that if I don't make SOMETHING happen, I may just end up on the street! (That's a bit overly dramatic, but only a bit.) I simply MUST push to make something happen this time. Being a creative is now my job.
P.S. - I do not currently have a method for readers to leave comments. I need to find a solution for that. It's on the To Do List!